It does, and as usual, Apple catched up a decade later. It was called Google Image Proxy for GMail (or something like that) when it was released, much to the chagrin of email marketers.
Since 2013, marketers haven’t known WHERE their readers are simply from users opening an email in Gmail.
But today, marketers don’t know IF their readers even open an email if users use Apple Mail.
Partial quote from the second article: “The issue is that the single most useful piece of information a sender gets from you[/the proxy] loading the image is that/when you read the email. And this is not mitigated at all by this system [b/c] when you open an email the server will see a request. Mix that with the ubiquitous uniquely-named images … and you get read notifications.”
(I want _neither_ to leak my IP _nor_ to have “Read Receipts” enabled when I get spam or whatever.)
This was a big announcement with Apple Mail Privacy Protection, included in iOS 15 (Sept. 2021). Sent marketers into a small panic.
If Gmail did so as well, should’ve been bigger news and figure they’d remind us we could disable the load remote content option.